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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25008082">By Any Other Name</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin'>kaeorin</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Loki's Lullabies [97]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Beautiful, Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Insecurity, Love, M/M, POV Loki (Marvel), Reader-Insert, Self-Esteem Issues</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:20:18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,528</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25008082</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki muses, for a while, over why you make that face or roll your eyes whenever he calls you beautiful.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Loki (Marvel)/Reader</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Loki's Lullabies [97]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>227</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>By Any Other Name</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Over time, Loki had (perhaps reluctantly) come to grips with the things that you did to him. Early on, he’d done his best to ignore the way his heart thudded a little faster when you looked at him. He’d refused to acknowledge the glowing warmth that rose into his cheeks when you smiled at him. When he found himself drifting closer to you, perhaps he waved it aside as being something wholly inevitable: you were, after all, the only mortal in the Tower who looked at him without any hesitance in your eyes, and he found that you were rather interesting to talk to. When the fluttering in his stomach became too intense to ignore any time you touched him and he finally accepted the excitement he felt any time Stark mentioned that you’d be visiting, he’d been forced to accept the way he felt. He could have lashed out at you. It would have been so easy, in theory, to snap at you and push you away, but in practice, he simply didn’t have the strength.</p><p>So he gave in to the fact that he’d fallen for you, and slowly allowed himself to realize that you’d done the same. For him. Somehow, that seemed even more impossible than his ability to accept the fact that he was tying himself to a mortal. But you made no attempts to hide the way you felt around him. Even on days where he was so weighed down by his past that he could not feel like himself, you looked at him with such softness in your eyes. You told him that you loved him before he could make himself form the words, but he’d known how you felt perhaps even longer than you had.</p><p>There was little that he would not do for you. He was not in the habit of sitting around musing about things like that, but he wanted to serve you, protect you, make sure you were always comfortable and secure. His younger self might have sneered at who he’d become, but you made it exceedingly easy to push that thought aside, because he knew that you felt the same. There was very little that you could not do for him, and he discovered the exception entirely by accident.</p><p>It’d been early morning. The two of you were lying together in your bed, just as you’d done the last several mornings now that your world had gone into lockdown. He’d opened his eyes before you, which gave him the quiet little thrill of being able to simply look at you. Golden light was creeping in from around your curtains, and it caressed you the way Loki constantly longed to do. He couldn’t take his eyes off of you. Your lashes curled gently against your cheeks, fluttering here and there in your sleep. Your mouth had fallen open, which only served to make him imagine what it’d be like to kiss you awake like the princes in all those Midgardian fairy tales. Your hair was mussed, but rather fetchingly so. It made him remember what had happened the night before, and he smiled. There was no tension in your face. Your brows were not furrowed, your mouth not tightened. There were absolutely no signs that your sleeping form even realized who was in bed beside you. Something about the picture you presented made Loki’s chest feel tight. Could you possibly understand what you did to him?</p><p>Maybe you were at least aware that he was staring at you, because, in time, your eyes drifted open. He loved your eyes. They were so warm and rich and brilliant, and of course the fact that they always lit up when you looked at him helped as well. He tried his best to breathe, and then reached out to caress your cheek.</p><p>“You are <i>beautiful</i>.” </p><p>The words weren’t quite enough, of course, because no human language could ever contain enough of the right words, but they’d do. But they’d made you narrow your eyes at him and wrinkle your nose dismissively, and <i>damn</i> if it didn’t make him want to devour you.</p><p>That was often your response. Whenever he made those kinds of comments about you, you mostly just laughed and shrugged him off. He knew that it wasn’t simply that you didn’t believe him. You had shown him, over and over again, that you trusted him. Maybe that was part of what had led him to fall for you in the first place: early on, when he was trying to work out how he felt, you fell for prank after prank, and you just kept looking at him with those wide, believing eyes. You were the first to make him feel like he <i>could</i> be trusted. </p><p>So why, then, did you never let yourself believe that he could be speaking the truth when he said these things to you? You were not in the habit of comparing yourself to other women aloud. If the two of you happened to watch a movie, sometimes you’d sigh dreamily and press yourself against him and comment on how beautiful some actress or another was, but you never gave any sign of coveting their appearances. Mortals were confusing.</p><p>But he loved to look at you. In the mornings, if you happened to wake and slip out of bed before him, he always did his best to move silently as he went to find you. Sometimes he found you in the living room. You’d taken up yoga in an attempt to keep up with some kind of exercise routine, and you hated it when he watched you. But he couldn’t look away. The things you could do with your body were wondrous, and he loved to watch you stretch and move. He’d watch the struggle in your face: the intensity of your focus versus your attempts to calm your mind and breathe into various parts of your body as the instructor on your computer screen chirped. If he found you most of the way through one of your routines, he’d see the way sweat began to glisten on your forehead, and even that felt so delicious to him. You worked hard to be well, and did your absolute best to follow along with each video even if you did mutter various off-color things about the women on your screen all throughout. </p><p>If he was careful, he could watch you as you worked. He hated it when you tethered yourself to your computer and told him you had to focus so you couldn’t pay attention to him, but there was a fierce determination in your eyes that always warmed him. You worked quickly, efficiently, fingers flying across the keyboard as you took care of all the various things that needed your attention. Before this whole lockdown, he’d never gotten to watch you work. He’d never even really thought about it before. Every last part of you seemed so sharp and ready when you worked; your effortless competence was, in many ways, incredibly attractive to him. </p><p>Perhaps he tried a little too hard to distract you when you had to sit in on video-conferences, always keeping himself safely away from your camera and always aware of how frequently your eyes drifted over towards him. The smiles that you gave him were at once fond and warning, and they made him want to laugh. When you were finished, he knew that you’d come to loom over him with your arms crossed and your lips pursed, but it was never much of a struggle to get you to let down your guard and allow him to take you into his arms.</p><p>There was just something about you. When you were working on something, you threw your entire self into your focus on that something. Perhaps there was some dark part of his mind that needed to be reassured that you were something complete on your own. If you’d been someone who devoted every last scrap of your attention to him, to fulfilling his wants and needs, it would have been harder for him to accept your love. But in these quiet moments when you did something for yourself, he got to see who you were outside of your love for him. You were complete on your own. You didn’t <i>need</i> him in your life, because there was plenty of other things that you could fill your time with. But you <i>wanted</i> him there, and that felt so much more important to him.</p><p>He liked it when you worked in the kitchen. You spent a lot of time baking, which of course filled the apartment with any number of delicious smells and had the expected result of lovely baked goods for him to sample. But he would lean in the doorway, or lurk in the hallway just beyond it, and watch you work. You studied your recipes with the same focus that you used for anything else. He’d watch you consult one of your many books, or take a look at the screen of your computer or your phone, and flit here and there throughout your kitchen to follow the directions. You mumbled things to yourself as you worked, and sometimes they escaped even his hearing, but sometimes he caught them, and he wanted to laugh. You kept a running commentary as you worked, mulling over your thoughts on the recipe or how you wanted to tweak it. On occasion he even caught you mumbling something about whether ‘he’d’ like something, and he could only assume that you were thinking of <i>him</i>. </p><p>Some of his most favorite moments to watch you, however, were in the early mornings after you dragged yourself out of bed. You had a particular routine in the morning, and it always ended with you sitting at your kitchen table with one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee. You’d allowed him to slip seamlessly into that routine. You allowed him to sit at the table with you while you tried to come to grips with the fact that the sun had risen yet another time and you were to be expected to remain awake for most of the day. </p><p>You always started out yawning and heavy-lidded. You struck him as the most vulnerable at this point in the morning. In the past, he’d successfully managed to convince you to come back to bed with him when you still looked at the world with squinted eyes. Sometimes your hair was neatly brushed, but sometimes it was still a little sleep-ruffled and fell into your face. When it did, he wished so dearly to move closer to you and smooth it out of your face with a gentle touch. You didn’t say much this early in the morning. But you’d make your way through your mug of coffee, sipping quietly here and there until it cooled enough to drink properly. </p><p>It was strangely fascinating for him, watching the awareness and spark of life slowly ebb back into your face as you woke up. When you were finished drinking, often you’d rise easily to your feet and go to get your computer so you could start on the day’s business. On the better days, however, you finally met his eyes across the table and smiled at him. Often, you made it hard for him to resist coming right out and calling you beautiful. But how could he <i>not</i>, when your smile was so warm and your eyes were so full of love? </p><p>Every single time, you wrinkled your nose and looked away, or you rolled your eyes with a sheepish smile and looked away. Mortals were so funny, like that. Over time, he’d come to realize that you didn’t feel worthy of such a word. You reacted like that because all of your stories and media and everything had you convinced that only a certain few people were beautiful—the actresses you sighed over when you were in his arms. You’d learned to shield yourself from words like that, and you did it with a funny face or a nervous laugh. </p><p>He didn’t stop calling you beautiful. He wouldn’t allow himself to do something as heinous as that. But he did start finding other ways to tell you the same things without words. He stopped letting his own fear of being unwelcome keep him from joining you when you worked on something. In the mornings, he’d let out a low growl of appreciation as you neared the end of your yoga routine. That always made you shriek a little and pull yourself to your feet, but he couldn’t hide the hungry way he took in the sight of your body. </p><p>He let you work for long stretches of time, until he simply <i>couldn’t</i> anymore, and draped himself around you so that he could whisper in your ear about all the things he had planned for when you were finished for the day. He stole kisses from you—never on camera, of course, because the idea of something so unprofessional seemed to horrify you, but if you were only typing, he quite liked seeing how long he could distract you from your work with his lips. </p><p>He pulled you into his arms in the kitchen and let his hands wander your body even as he kissed the side of your neck. You always seemed to welcome that, and usually allowed your hands to creep upwards so you could stroke his hair or wrap your arms around his neck. When you were cooking, the only thing that could possibly pull him away from you was the ding of one of your many timers, because he’d learned once that ignoring them led only to burnt cakes and disappointment.</p><p>And in the mornings, when he sat across the table from you, he did so quietly. He’d watch the slow shift in your body language and your facial expressions, always waiting for that spark he loved to see. On those mornings, it was hardest for him to keep from telling you over and over again just how gorgeous you were. Just how perfect. Just how precious and beautiful and treasured. There were times when he wanted to shout the truth from every rooftop in the city. Or when he wanted to sweep you into his arms and drag you back into the bedroom so he could spend the rest of the day proving to you just how truthful he could be. But he didn’t. He kept his thoughts to himself, allowing them to make his lips curl fondly while he simply watched you work yourself awake. </p><p>And when you finally did, and finally looked up so you could smile at him like he was the answer to your secret prayers, you struck him speechless. </p><p>“Good morning, my dearest,” he’d finally manage, even as his heart fluttered wildly in his chest. And you’d get up and move to stand behind him, and hold him tightly in your arms as you bid him good morning. When he reached to hold you closer, he told himself that his hands said the things that he, himself, could not.</p>
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